Wherever we are delighted, we often think of giving a treat, whether a friend or family treat or a self-treat. These days people browse over the internet to search for restaurants, checking the menu cards, ambiance, and more factors while choosing a restaurant. It becomes very important for the restaurants to feature good food photographs. Food photographs are the only source to impress the customer, be it an online menu card, offline menu card, or restaurant’s website or App.
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Restaurant food photography is restricted to menu cards, website food photographs, or app food photographs. Restaurant photography is all about showing off your skills to make the food look tastier so that the viewer cannot resist themselves from ordering the food you have photographed.
In this article let us see how you can take good food photographs in a restaurant.
Research
Whenever you are visiting a restaurant to shoot, make sure you have proper resources about the place—the kind of food they offer, their best cuisine, their ambiance, and so on. Try to interact with the chefs and, if possible, visit the place once before the actual shoot to get an idea of the lighting, backgrounds, and other equipment. Doing this would give you an idea about how to get prepared for the particular shoot. You can also tell the client if there is something they need to arrange from their side. They were visiting the place before the actual shoot to create a game plan and organize it smoothly.
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Speed up
While doing restaurant food photography, you need to make sure you are speedy. In a restaurant, there can be multiple interruptions, which can only increase your work. Chefs are always quick, so they can arrange whatever you require within few minutes. So, it would help if you were speedy to catch up with them. Moreover, if you are shooting in a restaurant during visiting hours, it would not be easy to keep the place, chef, and staff engaged for a longer time.
You cannot leave the food for a longer time. If you are shooting a hot item, you need to shoot with the smoke. This is also applicable for cold drinks and ice-creams.
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Do not hesitate to ask your client a lot of questions.
You will need to know and understand the requirement of the client. To achieve that, you will have to ask multiple questions to the client. Ask them questions like what they want to shoot, whether they have some particular demand, some idea, some storyline, and so on.
Check for the particular place of the restaurant where the food is to be photographed; check for natural light. You need to check on these factors because you will be required to prepare accordingly.
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Collaborate with the Chef
You must collaborate and communicate with the chef freely as he is the one who is going to prepare the food for you. He should understand how to make the food look best from the camera. You both should interact with each other before every shot.
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Incorporate Human Touch
You can take the shots of the chef garnishing the food or bartenders showing their skills or other candid moments in the restaurant. This will bring out originality in your photograph, and viewers believe it was shot in a real restaurant.
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Tethered Shooting is useful.
When you shoot for a restaurant, it can be useful if you shoot tethered. Tethered means that the photographs can be shown on your laptop instantly while you shoot, and this is useful because your client or anyone else can easily see the picture on the screen and judge them if required. This way, the client would get a chance to tell you whether they liked the picture or it needs any modifications before you move to the next shoot.
This also gives you an extra benefit. How? If by any chance, the client has any issues after the completion of the shoot, you can tell them that they approved each of the shots.
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Shooting Drinks
With a 100mm macro lens and a wide-open f-stop for shallow depth of focus, you are all set for shooting the drinks. You can place the glass at a distance from the cocktail or mocktail corner but keep them out of focus in the background.
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If things are distracting your frame, even if it is out of focus, eliminate them!
That is all about how you can make the tasty food look delicious through your Restaurant Photography Skills.
To learn more about Photography skills, e-commerce photography, product photography, fashion photography, wedding photography, and much more, follow our article.
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